Publication Date

2007

Degree Type

Master's Project

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

Abstract

In recent years, multimedia has become a commonly used tool for presenting contents to the users. The employment of multimedia is no longer limited to only the entertainment industry, but spans in other areas as well. In academics, lectures are recorded to audio and video for storage and distribution to students. Free online multimedia hosting services are popularly cherished, such as “youtube.com” and “yahoo video”, and with the increasing affordability of digital camera, hundreds, or maybe thousands, of home-made videos and music audio are created daily and published online. Low-cost digital recorders such as webcams also help promote the use of video for surveillance, both for commercial and personal use. Suddenly, there comes the need for digital multimedia delivery, which happens naturally with the advancement in Internet bandwidth and the popularity of multimedia sharing. Multimedia delivery comes in two methods: downloading and streaming. Streaming requires more complex structure, but rewards with better user experience. Although streaming is the method of choice today, downloading is still useful in ad-hoc situation where streaming is not feasible. This project aims to provide streaming-like capability to mobile devices. Since mobile gadgets are limited in resources compared to personal computers (PC), streaming sometimes is the only way to deliver media contents to user. This work targets devices in the so-called “ad-hoc situation”, and also seeks to save the cost associated with multimedia streaming, which traditionally uses the operator wireless network, by using a LAN-connected proxy and the Bluetooth medium. It is also to serve the educational purpose in learning about multimedia streaming on cellular phones. This project experiments with several approaches to implement streaming on mobile phones. It discusses each approach in details. Finally, a library and a sample application are implemented to demonstrate the solution.

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